is to find the black boxes. the pilot said he was having some weather troubles wanted to climb above it. he did not immediately get approval to do that should he have done it on his own? i don t think so. the thunderstorm is going to go much higher than the airplane could climb. if he is trying to climb up over the thunderstorms he is not make think right decision. the turn is a correct maneuver to get away from thunderstorms but i don t think the climb would have made any difference. we talk about air france 447 in which their pitot tube iced over the auto pilot shut off. the pilots flew a perfectly good working airplane other than the pete to tube in a stall attitude down to the surface of the ocean. that happened at night. they weren t aware of their southernings, couldn t tell where the horizon was didn t think their computers were giving them good information. there would have been some daylight in malaysia in this
official, the government of indonesia has formally requested that the government ask that the u.s. help in the search for missing flight 8501. they are still working through the details and the process but the official request has come in. david, let me turn back to you. i keep hearing that the pitot tube might have been iced over. this is a tube that provides air speed information. don t these aircraft have anti-icing equipment? yes, they do. as a matter of fact, in the air france 447, the dash-1 pitot tube was installed on that aircraft and it was recommended that they be replaced with the dash-2 tube and it has prevention for ice crystals. even though they are heated on the outside, the ice crystals can enter the pitot tube opening and they block that and crystallize there and connect together making a block so that the air speed indicators don t
the transponder allowing regional operators to see the unique identification code. so when it comes up it means there is an emergency. the aircraft has a problem and the whole world can see that and pull resources into it. the fact that none of this actually occurred is interesting. if we go back to air france 449 crash, the crew actually entered a catastrophic situation off the coast of brazil. it got into a situation where it plummeted into the ocean. it took just over two minutes to go from normal flight conditions into the ocean. the crew weren t aware of what s going on because a call didn t go out. why not? the icing iced up the pitot tube which gives air speed indicator the information it needs and it was giving them erroneous readings but they weren t aware of it because they were so focused to working with
40,000-foot plus range, any plane going through this part of the thunderstorm is going to encounter ice. and as i mentioned before some pivotal inch sprumtstruments on an airplane that is the pitot tube tube air flow can be restricted and cause serious problems with airspeed indications and the aircraft auto pilot also loses ability to fly. this is the setup with the northeast monsoon across this region. we re tapping into moisture from the south china sea, northeasterly wind flow encountering a mountainous terrain, giving uplift to create the thunderstorm intensity. this is where we saw that constant activity of thunderstorms, and natalie, going forward, our computer models here at the cnn weather
important. this is a turbulence indicator that pilots and meteorologists use to look at the turbulent potential areas across the world. here s java and the java sea where the airplane in question is being discussed about. now, it is indicated as a very high turbulence area. there was obviously some rough weather. but what s interesting to note this wording here indicates that thunderstorm cloud tops were roughly at 53,000 feet. extremely high, indicating it was a very strong set of thunderstorms that moved through the region leading to the possibility that turbulence was a factor. we recall what happened with the air france tragedy back in 2009. that particular airplane went into a thunderstorm cloud that ultimately had ice particles in it blocking a very crucial part of the engine called the pitot tube. and this measures basically the wind speed, or the pressure of the surrounding area across that